COMEDY videos are now criminalized in the UK as the totalitarian crackdown on free speech goes ballistic

(Natural News) A Scottish comedian has reportedly been convicted of a hate crime for a satirical video originally posted nearly two years ago depicting a pug giving the Nazi salute. A court found Count Dankula, a.k.a. Mark Meechan, 30, guilty of sharing a “grossly offensive” video.

Meechan’s YouTube channel has about 150,000 subscribers, but he noted this week that all of his videos have been de-monetized, and the particular clip in question has been placed on the restricted list.

Why someone would create a video having anything whatsoever to do with Nazis is an open question and fundamentally calls into question the issue of judgment. That aside, Meechan claims that he allegedly taught the dog the trick just to annoy his girlfriend. He added that the court failed to take into consideration context and intent of the controversial video, which has received three million-plus views, and he is considering lodging an appeal because of what he described as a huge miscarriage of justice.

“Sheriff [Derek] O’Carroll told the court he did not believe Meechan had made the video only to annoy his girlfriend and ruled it was anti-Semitic,” the BBC reported.

After the trial, Count Dankula quipped, “Don’t let your memes be dreams.” On a more serious note, he maintained that the ruling constituted a dark day for freedom of speech and expression, and suggested that comedians in the United Kingdom could be adversely affected by the court precedent.

Literally every single video on my channel has been demonetized. Even stuff that was already approved after manual review. @TeamYouTube seems to have just changed it's mind after already approving over half of them. It goes back years. pic.twitter.com/olN6r3DAS3

It is a sad irony that authorities in Europe aggressively pursue commentators for what they consider hate speech, but seem incapable of policing violent extremists in their midst.

According to Breitbart News, Count Dankula describes himself as a “center-left libertarian,” and that he “has always maintained that he is not a racist, and that the Nazis are in fact that a butt of the joke.”

Mark Meechan is due back in court on April 23 for sentencing. Ricky Gervais, the creator of The Office on British TV (the spinoff for which became a huge hit in America) wrote on Twitter after the Dankula decision that “If you don’t believe in a person’s right to say things that you might find ‘grossly offensive’, then you don’t believe in Freedom of Speech.”

A man has been convicted in a UK court of making a joke that was deemed "grossly offensive". If you don't believe in a person's right to say things that you might find "grossly offensive", then you don't believe in Freedom of Speech.

Setting aside the specifics of the Count Dankula case, Google, Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms have been accused of censoring those who don’t fit within Silicon Valley’s far-left progressive agenda. They’ve been doing this through measures such as suspensions, shadow banning, throttling, de-monetizing, de-platforming, and manipulating algorithms to suppress legitimate conservative and populist voices and independent media outlets. Leftists on social media are seldom, if ever, sanctioned for hate speech, however. (Related: Read more about totalitarian threats to online free speech at Censorship.news.)

Health Ranger Mike Adams, the founding editor of Natural News, recently reported that YouTube summarily deleted the entire 1,700 video catalog on the Health Ranger video channel. Most, if not all, of the tech giants, by the way, support so-called net neutrality but they seem less enamored with content neutrality.

Understand that freedom of the press is now being utterly destroyed by these techno-tyrants that have been infested with radical left-wing crybullies and snowflakes who now serve as “trusted flaggers” to selectively censor their targets.

There’s no denying it: the technology dictatorship is upon us.

With that in mind, Mike has announced the creation of Real.Video, a p2p file sharing infrastructure for videos and other content such as audio files, PDF files, text files and HTML files. Content creators interested in requesting an invitation should click herefor more information on this pro-liberty initiative.